I'm Baaaaaack!

Hello again.... so after nearly a year off of the blog, I'm back! A lot has happened in the past year: I was offered a job with the Chicago Blackhawks. I turned down a job with the Blackhawks. I was offered a promotion with US Presswire. I accepted the promotion with US Presswire. I went to the Vancouver Winter Olympics. I edited yet another Final Four, Super Bowl, BCS Championship, and not one, but TWO MLB All-Star Games. The Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup. I will not be receiving a very expensive and gaudy championship ring...

I really do wish I kept up with this blog, and I regret not doing a daily Olympic blog like I did for the 2008 Beijing Games, but I had to take a break for personal reasons. Oh well. So here's the highlight package from the past year....

So in most of my travels, I go as an on-site photo editor. One of the responsibilities as the photo editor is to help push photos from our photographers to our clients as quickly as possible. But before all that happens, the editor has to run up to the highest point in the stadium and get the overall of the venue. This is what it looked like at the 2009 MLB All-Star Game in St. Louis.



Fast forward to February, and we arrive at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Like the Beijing Olympics, I had the pleasure of being able to go to the games as a photographer, as opposed to solely a photo editor. For the Vancouver games, I was based in Whistler, and mostly shot alpine and nordic skiing. My favorite events to shoot by far was the alpine skiing and chasing USA's top medal hopeful Lindsey Vonn. She started off the games with a gold in the downhill, but crashed out in pretty much every race after that. Basically an alpine skiing version of Ricky Bobby. Wooooooo! First or last, baby!




After the Olympics were over, it was time for playoff hockey. The Chicago Blackhawks had a great run through the playoffs and won the ultimate prize - the Stanley Cup. I went into the playoffs with mixed emotions... I was obviously happy for my home town team, but am somewhat annoyed that I lost out on the opportunity to own a Stanley Cup championship ring. Oh well, in the long run, I am probably better off where I am now anyways.




So in the Stanley Cup Finals, I once again played the editor while on the road. But I did manage to come away with a shot of the Stanley Cup clinching goal. The reason I was able to shoot Kane's goal was because in the last five minutes of the game (regardless of score), the NHL requires a photographer to be in position at the ice level entrance to shoot any potential victory ceremony. Obviously we didn't want to leave a premium ice position open, so the solution is just to have the editor (me) replace the photographer. I had no idea (along with everyone else in the arena) that Kane's shot went in, until I looked in the back of my camera. Who needs instant replay?




So that's the past year in a nutshell. For the next month or so, it'll just be Cubs and White Sox until NFL training camp and the new football season begins!

Lifelock.400

Well, it's been a while since I last posted here, and I apologize. I have a few events that I have covered recently and I will catch up with them in the next couple of days. But first up from earlier this month is the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Chicagoland Speedway, the Lifelock.com 400.

As far as photo coverage for a NASCAR race weekend goes, they are all the same. In the days leading up to the actual race day, there are qualifying and practice rounds. While you can get shots of the cars going round and round in circles during these sessions, the time is better spent getting shots of the drivers either in or around their cars.





Nothing amazing, but we all have to do this, because come race day, the drivers aren't as accessible. All right, the boring qualification/practice days out of the way, we arrive at race day. The annoying thing about doing a NASCAR race is how ridiculously early you have to get there for it. Not because there's anything that really goes on, but just to beat the traffic. As you can imagine, traffic becomes a real pain in the ass when you try to jam 200,000 people into a venue in which there is only one highway exit. Better sit at the track than at traffic, and while you're there, you might as well look for some sort of pre-race feature to send off. Here I have a shot of the crew of Mark Martin pushing his car out to the track:



Eventually, I killed off all the time and it was time for the race. I started off by wandering around the grid looking for a nice shot of drivers with their families. Here's a shot of three-time champion Jimmie Johnson with wife Chandra during the national anthem. I got down and shot from a low angle so that instead of having the stands as a background, all I get is blue sky.



Now, I'm not really much of a NASCAR shooter, and I don't pretend to know a lot about the sport. But what I have always been told is that the Chicago race is a "boring" race. In other words, there are usually no big crashes, let alone any crashes. So knowing this, I knew I would be able to wander around and go look for some more artsy stuff instead. Around 8:30pm, the sun was starting to get really low in the sky, and was creating a cool effect as it set behind the main grandstand. I knew I had to take advantage of it so I shot some of it from a photo position near the track for a few minutes and got the leaders going around.



Then hurried and ran up the stairs of the grandstand for an overall view.



After transmitting, I positioned myself for the finish line and shot the winner crossing the finish line. I will admit, I kind of screwed it up and chopped the flag stand out of it, so you can't really tell that it is the last lap, but you'll have to trust me on this.



Again from my racing buddies, I knew Martin is not one to show much emotion when he wins, so I quickly ran over to victory lane to get in position to shoot the presentation. I was surprised that he even gave a fist pump when he climbed out of the car (albeit a pretty weak one), and showed a decent amount of excitement when popping the champagne.




So that's it for NASCAR in Chicagoland. Strange as it is, I did the very next NASCAR race two weeks later in Indianapolis. I'll have a post soon!

BNP Paribas Open

For picture editors, March is arguably the busiest time in the entire sports calendar year because of the conference basketball tournaments and March Madness. It's pretty well documented that I'm not a huge fan of shooting (or even watching) basketball, so I will move onto something else that I worked on last month: tennis!

Of all the events that I get to attend, I think my annual favorite is the Indian Wells Masters (officially, the BNP Paribas Open, formerly the Pacific Life Open). How can that be? It's a random tennis tournament in the desert that's not even a major! Well, first off, the media accommodations are fantastic, the weather is great (in the two weeks combined I've been there, it was sunny every day except for one), and the crowd is knowledgable and friendly. But the real reason? Because the action is always good and the light is fantastic.

You might think tennis is an extremely easy sport to photograph, because you simply follow a player as the ball bounces from one end to another. In that respects, you are correct. But as in every sport, what will separate the average photographer from the good and the great, is attention to detail. To elaborate (as quoted from a fellow photographer I highly respect)... this means attention to backgrounds, good composition, and taking advantage of good light.

But let's start out with the average.... Follow the bouncing ball!




You follow the bouncing ball long enough, and eventually you might get lucky and get something a bit different....





So now that the ordinary stuff is out of the way (to satisfy the conservative clients), it's time to push things creatively....

The weather in Indian Wells in March is pretty much 85 degrees and sunny every day. The light beats down hard on the players all day long, and depending on the time of day, you can really work some creative angles based on the way the shadows are cast onto the court by the players or the stadium itself.

That said, early in the day (matches typically start at 11am), the light is actually quite difficult to work with. When shooting with the sun, players are very front lit and the images look very "contrasty." Shooting back lit leads to a bit more consistent colors, but washes them out a bit so they can look flat. However, there was one spot in the photo well that I discovered you can stand in where there is a completely clean background and if you underexpose the shot a bit, you can get a pretty neat rim lighting effect on the serves:



But later in the day is where you can really start to get wild. As the sun begins to make its way across the sky, the shadows gradually get longer and longer. The easiest way to utilize this natural prop was simply go into the upper deck and shoot it in such a way as to utilize the long shadows:



Shooting from the opposite direction yields a different yet equally interesting effect:



From that photo above, you can see that the stadium court late in the day begins casting a huge shadow over the entire playing surface. If you are patient enough, players may run into it in such a way that only portions of the athlete are lit, but the rest of them are in shadow. The effect is quite dramatic:



So that's basically what I did for a full week. Shoot the conservative stuff early in the matches, and start working the light and shadows as the day progressed. Tennis could be an extraordinarily boring game to photograph, but by taking advantage of the environment, there was always compelling photos to be had. That is why I enjoyed doing this event last year, again this year, and hopefully again next year!

The Great American Race

It seems like this winter I have spent more time in Florida than I have back home in Chicago. However, instead of bouncing between Tampa and Miami as I have been doing, I was off to World Center of Racing, the Daytona International Speedway for the 51st running of the Daytona 500.

Being someone who grew up in the north, I could care less for NASCAR or any form of auto racing for that matter. My vision of NASCAR has always been an extremely stereotypical one: a bunch of drunk southerners sitting in trailer parks with Confederate flags flying, drinking beer, and watching the cars go around in circles. And don't get me wrong.... driving into Daytona for the first time, there was plenty of that.

However, the first thing that stood out to me when I arrived other than the ridiculously high percentage of "red necks" was that the place was massive. Daytona International Speedway features a 2.5 mile tri-oval course, and packs in over 170,000 fans not including the trailer camp on the infield. World Center of Racing indeed....




Anyways, I'm going to skip a whole week's worth of hype, and jump into the actual race. The Daytona 500 is often called the Super Bowl of racing, and as such, it attracts some of the biggest stars in the country.



We used five photographers to cover this race.... it seems like a lot, but in order to cover 2.5 miles of track, you need many sets of eyes and cameras. So we had one photographer on the roof (to act as a safety and see the whole track). The other four of us were scattered throughout: one in the pit, one at turn three, one at turn four, and one at turn one/two (that was me!).

Daytona is known for having many many crashes... often collecting a good percentage of the field. Every year, there seems to be one significant crash known by fans and drivers as "The Big One." As we were working as a team, I was required to stay inside turns one and two and cover the race from that section of the track. Needless to say, I was hoping to be "lucky" enough to be lucky enough to have the Big One develop in front of me. The closest thing I got to an accident was when Jeff Burton hit the wall up in turn two and lost his bumper (the Big One this year happened in just before turn three):



So without any major incidents in my area all day, I had to bust out all of my photography tricks to turn prevent all my pictures from being boring (yet required) car picture after car picture.



One easy way to break up the ordinary was to simply drop the shutter speed down to around 1/80 and using a technique called panning. In this case, I would "pan" the camera as I shoot so that the background gets motion blurred, yet the subject I am following stays sharp. I did this for some of the more important drivers or race leaders. In this example, Kyle Busch:



That's not the only slow shutter trick to pull off in racing. As another one I used pretty frequently to mix up the take was to drop the shutter speed, but not use any panning. In this case, the background stayed sharp, but the cars going around the track just leave a trail of color:




Another thing to do was just to try to use different elements in front of me to frame the cars in unique ways. Here I used the gap in the safety barrier in front of me to add some lines to the frame:



And one last trick I busted out for this race was adding a star filter to my lens. Typically when you look at or photograph stadium lighting, it's just a big blob of white (like in some previous images above). However when you throw on a star filter, the lights look like, well, stars.... if you feel like you've seen this type of gimmick before, it's because you have. TV uses it all the time when they do their stadium shots...



For those of you who followed the race, you will know that this race was called after 152 out of 200 scheduled laps due to rain. Therefore, the race leader at the time Matt Kenseth was declared winner. I was kind of bummed about that. Even though it was nice the race ended earlier than it would have had they run it, it also meant I lost the opportunity to shoot some cool burn out or victory lap as a celebration. Oh well, rain didn't mean they couldn't do a made for TV victory celebration shot.

A big dilemma for photographers in shooting celebrations is this: do you shoot it tight, or do you shoot it loose and artsy? There is not time to shoot it one way, change cameras, and shoot it the other way because the moment would be over. Well, I had a solution, and it required that I bust out yet another camera trick: the shooting two-hand held cameras at the same time trick.

In one hand, I used my 70-200mm to get the standard celebration shot:



But in my other hand, I used my 16-35mm to get the wide version shot (note the use of the star filter again). Needless to say, looking through two cameras at the same time is impossible, so the wide angle version was actually shot blind as I looked through the other camera to frame the 70-200 properly. In the business, we call it a "Hail Mary."



An unexpected bonus of this wide angle shot was that I was able to get a third version of victory lane with some creative cropping:



This was actually my very first time shooting two hand-helds at the same time. I'm sure I looked extremely stupid holding two cameras at the same time, and it sure made my arms sore, but the I think the results speak for themselves, and will definitely be something I will do in all future victory lanes. I can probably even apply it to other fields of photography.... perhaps even in weddings like when the bride and groom durign the recessional? I got a wedding coming up this weekend, so I guess we'll see :-)

US Figure Skating Championship

On Friday, one of our photographers had to back out of a fairly large assignment at the last minute for a family emergency. Needless to say, it left me and the primary assigning editor scrambling for a replacement. Unfortunately, we couldn't find anybody in reasonable driving range, so of course, as pretty much the only person on staff who also shoots, I ended up being sent to this assignment. So, the day before I was scheduled to go down to Tampa for the Super Bowl, I packed up my bags early and made a pit stop in Cleveland for the 2009 US Figure Skating Championship.



I'm sure this comes as no surprise that this was my first time covering a figure skating event. And this will probably be the case with many other winter Olympic sports, as we draw nearer to the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. That said, I wasn't really worried about it. My boss pretty much summed it up: "It's like swimming" in the sense that if it moves, shoot it!

Well, not so fast. As I've preached many times before, it's one thing to just photograph something that moves around and get it in focus. It's a whole another thing to do so with clean backgrounds. Of course, the easiest way to do this at a skating event is to just go up into the concourse, and use the nice white sheet of ice as your background:





It was pretty easy to just follow the competitors around from up there, and I was happy with those results. Nothing terribly original, but it is exactly the kind of images that a client looking for figure skating images would be looking for.

That said, I got a little bored just sitting up in my perch in the upper levels, as all the pictures started to look the same. It's not like tennis where even though the sport itself is repetitive, changing your position on the court yields a different image because of the way the sun is shining, or the way the lines on the court get positioned. Here you are indoors and on a sheet of ice, so no matter which way you face it will look exactly the same! So, I decided backgrounds be dammed, I'm going to shoot from downstairs. Look at how ugly it is (I didn't use this shot, it's just an example)!



The only way to combat that is patience, and a long lens. So I pulled out the 400 (which is what I used to shoot with from the concourse), and shot everything super tight. I also waited for the skaters to drift into a spot on the wall that was clean of all ads, and a spot where there were no fans seated.



Needless to say, this drops the photo output pretty significantly, so for the last few individual skaters (and the most important ones for that matter), I went back to my perch up top because I wanted to be sure I got something of them to file.



From that vantage point, I got kind of lucky and got a nice moment after the final competitor and eventual champion Alissa Czisny received some gifts and a hug from who I would assume are friends or relatives.




But when it came to the real awards ceremony, I got the ol' Beijing treatment, where only "pool" photographers got to shoot front and center (aka Getty, AP, Sports Illustrated, etc). So all I could really get were partially obstructed views of the medal/awards ceremony (thank you TV camera man for always standing in the way).



Not amazing, but it's a shot we need to have. Unfortunately, this will probably always be a problem for our organization, unless we start to strike some deals and make some noise in the industry. I know we have some things in the works, so hopefully we get to that point by the time the 2010 Vancouver Games come around!